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LiveScience
LiveScience
Rory Harris

'A mixture from zero to infinity': Physicists split apart a photon — and ended up with an improbable swarm of particles

A lightbulb is shattered with various colors coming out of it against a black background.

Physicists recently wondered what would happen if you tried to split a photon ‪—‬ and they found some unexpected behavior that may transform the way we think about particles.

The experiment, in which researchers simulated a photon being sliced by a shutter under various conditions, showed that a severed photon can lead to a complex mixture of zero to infinitely-many photons — raising some big questions about the nature of particle interactions.

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